One of the things I’ve been doing during One Creative Summer is making time for all of the books about creativity that have been piling up on my “to read” list for a while. I have read several gems during the past month or two, like Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance by Jonathan Fields. Have you guys read this one? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’m a note taker, so I keep pens and paper nearby to jot down any thoughts or ideas that bubble up or quotes that I’m drawn to while I’m reading the material. I feel like I’m back in grad school, but this time I’m only studying the parts of psychology and human behavior that I love the most – it’s a summer intensive in creativity!
I’ll be sharing some of the things that I’ve learned, ideas that I’ve developed, and inspirational quotes that have come from my summer studies, starting with today’s quote by Jonathan Fields.
“In eliminating uncertainty we kill our shot at brilliance.”
Our tendency is to avoid risk. We don’t want to move to a new place unless we’re certain we have a new job. We don’t want to go to art school unless we’re certain we’ll be successful. We don’t want to open a bakery unless we’re certain it’s going to be profitable.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at things) there’s no way we can know the outcome of our decisions. We can decide to move to Santa Monica, but we can’t know for sure what’s going to happen when we get there.
What is your relationship with risk?
I’m not sure exactly when it started, but somewhere along my anxiety-riddled way of living I began taking chances. Big ones. If I wasn’t happy where I was living, I’d go somewhere else, job or no job. If I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing, I found a new path to take. I didn’t stop thinking about the risks involved in my decisions. They just became less important than the type of life that I wanted to live and the person I wanted to be. Some of the choices I made were still scary, but I had to find ways to live with the fear while inching closer and closer to my desired life.
Sometimes we need help with choices. I must have talked to my friends about leaving my full-time job until I hurt their ears. Sometimes we need another point-of-view or some help creating a clear plan to get started living the life we want most. That’s part of what I do with my creative coaching clients – present practical ways of helping them take action and move through the fear.
How do you do it? When you have something you REALLY want to do but you’re scared of trying, how do you learn to trust yourself and jump?
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